Quadra Web Hosting Review 2018

Since opening in 2002, Quadra Web Hosting has been providing Web Hosting services to hard-working Aussies. Their Australian based support team provides prompt, friendly and knowledgeable support.

We were thoroughly impressed with the Shared Hosting plan that we tested. Incredible speeds, an extensive list of features and great price point makes Quadra Hosting a very attractive option to those looking for an Aussie-based web host.

Our verdict? The fastest shared hosting speeds out of the box to date, reasonable price points and features like free SSL certificate make Quadra an awesome choice for those with small and large websites alike.

Quadra Hosting Quick Facts

Pros

Cons

Blazing fast speeds out of the box

No phone/live chat support

Feature-packed Shared Hosting

Only managed VDS (no command line)

Free Let's Encrypt SSL certificate

1. Performance and Uptime

Quadra has delivered some outstanding speed test results that are a testament to the quality of their hardware, their commitment to not overloading each server and their clustered server environment.

On our test site, we got some unreal speeds. In fact, to date, these are the fastest out of the box load times of any web host so far.

Loading at a blazingly fast 1.1 seconds through GT Metrix and 793ms from Pingdom without a caching plugin, it’s clear that the shared hosting servers are running on some nice hardware and unlikely to have too many websites crammed onto each server – which means better speeds for you!

At the time of writing, Quadra is now officially the fastest Shared Hosting plan out of the box that we’ve tested, taking over the mantle from Crucial Hosting.

After installing the W3TC caching plugin, it’s interesting to note that the speeds didn’t change much at all. Probably because it’s already so quick without any plugins! Using GT Metrix, the load speed remained the same as 1.1 seconds and reduced down to 720ms through Pingdom.

Most web hosts will struggle to load at under 1 second even after heavy optimisation. The fact that Quadra can do it out of the box, on shared hosting, is a great indication that you’re dealing with a quality web host.

Quadra offers VDS options for those who require the highest levels of performance and reliability. Unfortunately, we weren’t able to get a VDS for testing, but we’ll go through some of the key performance features of their VDS’.

With most hosting providers, you’d expect to see a solid speed boost when upgrading from Shared Hosting to a VDS platform. Quadra seems to be an outlier though, because their Shared Hosting is so fast, which means there’s only so much faster a VDS could possibly be.

So, if you aren’t getting a speed boost, why upgrade to a VDS?

The answer is Reliability and Stability.

Quadra hosts less than 20 virtual servers on each physical machine which means you will get the highest performance without the physical server CPU or RAM being maxed out.

One of the disadvantages of Shared Hosting is that if every website you’re sharing with has lots of traffic, it can take resources from your website and slow you down.

With a VDS your hardware is isolated from others which eliminates contention. Quadra says that with their VDS’ there is “no sharing, no over-provisioning and no resource contention”.

1.3 Uptime

Quadra Hosting provides its customers with a 99.9% uptime guarantee. Outside of this uptime, they offer hosting credit as a percentage of the cost of your hosting plan.

For eg. If their uptime drops to 98-99.8%, you will get a credit equal to 10% of your monthly hosting cost. This percentage increases the lower their uptime is.

2. Price

Quadra’s Shared Hosting price is pretty middle-of-the-road, being slightly more expensive than other providers such as Digital Pacific and Netoriginbut also offsetting the cost by providing a huge number of features which make the price quite competitive.

Their VDS/VPS plans are also somewhere around the middle, and it’s important to remember that their plans are Managed, which drives the price up for additional peace-of-mind and ease-of-use.

It’s true that you get what you pay for though and with the epic speeds of the Shared Hosting, you can tell the VDS plans are going to be blazing fast and rock solid.

The shared hosting monthly plans start at $9.90/month for the Starter plan, which gives you 5GB of disk space, 20GB monthly data transfer, unlimited subdomains and a whole slew of other features.

At $12.90/month is the Value plan, which in my opinion, is the best shared hosting plan due to a few extra features that you get over the Starter plan.

As well as an increased 20GB disk space and 50GB monthly data transfer, you also get a free Let’s Encrypt SSL certificate, secure SSH access to your website, ability to create cron jobs (automated scripts) and the ability to purchase a dedicated IP for your site.

There are another two plans going up to $19.90/month which give you more disk space and monthly data transfer.

Each Shared Hosting plan has daily and weekly backups which can be restored for free as well as firewall protection, FTP access and a whole myriad of other inclusions.

It’s also worth noting that if you pay for your Shared Hosting annually, you’ll get 2 months for free! There is also a 30-day money back guarantee.

These fully managed servers are monitored 24×7 by Quadra staff and have a web-based control panel for those who aren’t inclined to be working in a command prompt!

VDS plans each have a flat $199.95 setup fee. The VM Basic plan which starts at $199.95/month has 1GB of RAM, 100GB of Traffic, 1 CPU core, 40-75GB of disk space.

Included in the price are a number of benefits, daily and weekly backups which are free to restore, unlimited databases on your VM and external DNS servers.

If you have a Shared Hosting plan and want to upgrade to a Virtual Server, you can be migrated over with little hassle and limited disruption to your website.

3. Usability

Quadra Hosting has their own version of the website control panel, which is fairly intuitive to get around. Thankfully, I was never left scratching my head as to where to find what I was looking after or how to do it.

Changing my plan was as simple as clicking the ‘Change Plan’ button tab in the menu, and changing my payment method required a click on the ‘Billing/Payment Info’ button. Intuitive and easy – nice!

3.1 Shared Hosting

Shared Hosting Dashboard – All your Helpful options are here

There is a tools area which of course, has a few useful tools that you can play around with. One is the app installer. After clicking on the button, I was taken to another page to find that they use the Softaculous app installer, like most other web hosts.

The Softaculous app installer is super simple, and is as easy as going to the app you want to install on your website and pressing ‘install’. In my case, I installed WordPress with just a few clicks and within a minute I was presented with the familiar Hello World! Screen. Not difficult at all!

3.2 Virtual Dedicated Server Hosting

The Virtual Servers run on a H-Sphere web-based control panel. H-Sphere is an icon-based control panel which is as easy to use as C-Panel or any of the other web-based tools out there.

Having a web-based control panel is advantageous, as many Virtual Servers are configured and setup through the command line terminal.

I always like when companies offer the control panel option, as it allows those who want great performance, but might not be as technologically savvy, the option to still configure their site without needing to dive into the bare code to set it up.

4. Support

Quadra Hosting Support Email

As we do with all support teams, we shot off our three questions to gauge their responsiveness and the quality of their reply. I also sent other unrelated emails which will average into their response time.

Jason got back to me within an hour with responses to my three questions. The answer to the first two questions are great, but I have some question marks over the third one. If I was someone who had no tech knowledge at all, I’d find his answer quite confusing and his steps are at odds with how I installed WordPress.

I believe it should say that you open your web-based control panel, navigate to the tools area and click ‘app installer’ which takes you to the Softaculous section I mentioned earlier, and then click WordPress and follow the prompts.

Overall, the response is pretty good. Across all the emails sent to their support, the average response time was 1 Hour and 21 minutes, which is respectably quick.

Whilst their support is available by email 24×7, it’s disappointing that they aren’t contactable via phone and there’s no ability to live chat with someone. If you had a VDS, you would take some comfort that it’s being watched 24/7 by one of their Server Administrators, but we’d still like the option to be able to talk to someone immediately.

5. Additional Features

Quadra has a number of additional features which you might find handy.

5.1 Daily and Weekly Backups

Your website is backed up daily and weekly so that you can revert back if you make any critical changes that go wrong, or something corrupts. Restores are completely free, which is actually a big deal because some web hosts charge you to restore the backup.

5.2 Free Let’s Encrypt SSL Certificate

This is another feature which is a big deal. From July 2018, Google is actually marking sites without an SSL certificate installed as ‘insecure’ which will have a negative impact on your website traffic, especially those running an e-commerce business.

5.3 WordPress Services

If things start to get a bit too hard or you’re over it and just want to throw money at a solution, then Quadra has you covered.

They offer WordPress Malware Cleaning, Updating, Optimisation and ‘Hack Proof WordPress’ services where they will go into your site and clean it/update it/speed it up etc. for a fee. This could be something you consider initially as a once off to get your website optimised initially.

6. Cons of Quadra Web Hosting

With the good, we take the bad..

6.1 Support is only available through Email

This is the biggest concern I have, email is great and the support team responded to me relatively quickly, but sometimes more complex issues can be explained over the phone in 5 minutes, as opposed to hours of emails.

6.2 Lack of VDS command line / Operating Systems

Depending on your technical expertise, you may prefer the flexibility that a command-line based VDS offers you. Additionally, the two OS’ that Quadra offers – FreeBSD and CentOS, are a little left field compared to the usual Ubuntu/Debian flavours that you often see.

Out of the box, we got some amazing speeds that I never knew Shared Hosting could produce. With page load speed being so important for both consumers and used as part of the Google ranking algorithm, you want your site to be snappy and Quadra delivers.

Their prices are very reasonable and the support we got was pretty good. You won’t find yourself stumbling around their web consoles as they’re mostly intuitive and easy to use.

If speed is critical for your site, then Quadra is going to deliver.

Quadra Web Hosting Review 2018

Performance

Price

Usability

Support

Pros

Blazing fast speeds out of the box

Feature-packed Shared Hosting

Free SSL certificate

Cons

No phone/live chat support

Only managed VDS (no command line)

4.3

Our verdict? The fastest shared hosting speeds out of the box to date, reasonable price points and features like free SSL certificate make Quadra an awesome choice for those with small and large websites alike.